After Midnight (7 page)

Nikki noticed his unease. She wondered if he was as attracted to her emotionally as he seemed to be physically. It had worried her when he'd admitted that he had a lover. Of course, he thought she did, too, and it couldn't have been further from the truth. But it could be, she was forced to admit,
remembering the feel of his big arms around her. He could be her lover. She trembled inside at the size and power of his body. Mosby had never been able to bring himself to make love to her at all. He'd only been able to touch her lightly and without passion. She hadn't known what it was to be kissed breathless, to be a slave to her body's needs, until this stranger had come along. There were many reasons that would keep her from becoming intimate with him. And the first was the faceless lover who clung to him in the darkness. She didn't know how to compete with another woman, because she'd never had to.

She forced her wandering mind back to the fishing. This had been one of the most carefree days of her life. She was sad to see it end. Kane had agreed to come to supper, but she was losing him now to other concerns. His mind wasn't on the fish, or her. She wondered what errant thought had made him so preoccupied.

“I have to make a telephone call, or I'd help you clean the fish,” he said when he left her at the front door of her beach house with the cooler.

“Business?” she asked.

His face showed nothing. “You might call it that.” He didn't say anything else. He smiled at her distractedly and left with a careless wave of his hand.

Nikki went in to clean the fish, disturbed by his sudden remoteness. What kind of business could he have meant?

 

Kane listened patiently while the angry voice at the other end of the telephone ranted and railed at him.

“You promised that we could go to the Waltons' party tonight!” Chris fumed. “How can you do this to me? What sort of deal are you working on that demands a whole evening of your time?”

“That's hardly your concern,” he said in a very quiet voice. Her rudeness and lack of compassion were beginning to irritate him. She was a competent psychologist, and he couldn't fault her intellect. But their mutual need for safe intimacy had been their only common bond. Chris wanted a man she could lead around by the nose in any emotional relationship. Kane wasn't the type to let anyone, man or woman, dictate to him. He'd tired of Chris. Tonight, she was an absolute nuisance.

“When will you phone me, then?” she asked stiffly.

“When I have time. It might be as well if we don't see as much of each other in the future.”

There was a hesitation, then a stiff, “Perhaps you're right. You're a wonderful lover, Kane, but I always have the feeling that you're going over cost overruns even when we're together.”

“I'm a businessman,” he reminded her.

“You're a business,” she retorted. “A walking, talking industry, and I still say you should be in therapy. You haven't been the same since…”

He didn't want to hear any more. “I'll phone you. Good night.”

He put the receiver down before she could say anything else. He'd had quite enough of her psychoanalysis. She did it all the time, even when she was in bed with him; especially when she was in bed with him, he amended. If he was aggressive, she labeled him a repressed masochist. If he was tender, he was pandering to her because he felt superior. Lately, she inhibited him so much that he lost interest very quickly when he was in bed with her, to the point of not being able to consummate lovemaking. That really infuriated her. She decided that his real problem was impotence.

If her barbs hadn't been so painful, they might have been amusing. He'd never been impotent in his life with anyone except Chris. Certainly he was more capable than ever when he just looked at Nikki. But, then, Nikki apparently didn't have any reason to hate and despise men. She was very feminine along with her intelligence, and she didn't tease viciously.

He got up and changed from jeans and jersey into dress slacks and a comfortable yellow knit shirt. Fried fish with Nikki was suddenly much
more enticing than a prime rib and cocktails with Chris.

He selected a bottle of wine from the supply he'd imported and carried it along with him. He wondered if Nikki knew anything about fine white wine. She was an intelligent girl, but she hadn't the advantages of wealth. Probably she wouldn't know a Chardonnay from a Johannisberg Riesling. That was something he could teach her. He didn't dare think about tutoring her in anything else just yet. She could become even more addicting than alcohol if he let her. Chris was all the trouble he needed for the present.

Nikki had cleaned and fried the fish and was making a fruit salad and a poppyseed dressing to go with it when Kane knocked briefly and let himself into the cottage.

She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him. “Come on in,” she invited. She was wearing a frilly floral sundress that left most of her pretty, tanned back bare while it discreetly covered her breasts in front. She was barefoot at the kitchen table and Kane felt his body surge at the picture of feminine beauty she presented. How long had it been, he tried to recall, since he'd seen a woman in his own circle of friends wearing anything less masculine than a pin-striped business suit? Nikki dressed the way he liked to see a woman dress, not flaunting her curves but not denying it, either. She
dressed as if she had enough confidence in her intellect not to have to hide her womanhood behind it.

“I've just finished the salad and dressing. Want to set the table?” she asked brightly.

He hesitated. He couldn't remember ever doing that in his life. Even as a child, there had always been maids who worked in the kitchen.

“The plates are there,” she nodded toward a cupboard with her head. “You'll find utensils in the second drawer. Place mats and napkins are in the third drawer.” She noticed his expression and his hesitation with faint amusement. “You do know how to set a table?”

“Not really,” he admitted.

“Then it's high time you learned,” she said. “Someday you may get married, and think how much more desirable you'll be if you know your way around a kitchen.”

He didn't react to the teasing with a smile. He stared at her with a curious remoteness and she remembered belatedly the dead wife she wasn't supposed to know about.

“I don't want to marry anyone,” he said unexpectedly. “Especially a woman I've only just met,” he added without being unkind.

“Well, certainly you don't want to marry me right now,” she agreed. “After all, you don't even know me. Sadly, once you discover my worthy
traits and my earthy longings, you'll be clamoring to put a ring on my finger. But I'll have to turn you down, you know. I already have a commitment.”

His face went hard and his eyes glittered. He turned away from her and began searching in drawers. “Some commitment,” he muttered. “The man doesn't even come to check on you. What if a hurricane hit? What if some criminal forced his way in here and raped you, or worse?”

“He phones occasionally,” she said demurely.

“What a hell of a concession,” he returned. “How do you stand all that attention?”

“I really don't need your approval.”

“Good thing. You won't get it. Not that I have any plans other than supper,” he added forcefully, glaring at her as he began to put things on the table in strange and mysterious order.

She didn't bother to answer the gibe. “You really should take lessons in how to do a place setting,” she remarked, noting that he had the forks in the middle of the plate and the knives lumped together.

“I don't want to make a career of it.”

“Suit yourself,” she told him. “Just don't blame me if you're never able to get a job as a busboy in one of the better hotels. Heaven knows, I tried to teach you the basics.”

He chuckled faintly. She turned and began to put
the food on the table. Afterward, she rearranged the place settings until they were as they should be.

“Show-off,” he accused.

She curtsied, grinning at him. “Do sit down.”

He held the chair out for her, watching when she hesitated. “I am prepared to stand here until winter,” he observed.

With a long sigh, she allowed him to seat her. “Archaic custom.”

“Courtesy is not archaic, and I have no plans to abandon it.” He sat down across from her. “I also say grace before meals—another custom which I have no plans to abandon.”

She obediently bowed her head. She liked him. He wasn't shy about standing up for what he believed in.

Halfway through the meal, they wound up in a discussion of politics and she didn't pull her punches.

“I think it's criminal to kill an old forest to save the timbering subsidy,” she announced.

His thick eyebrows lifted. “So you should. It is criminal,” he added.

She put down her fork. “You're a conservationist?”

“Not exclusively, but I do believe in preservation of natural resources. Why are you surprised?” he added suspiciously.

That was an answer she had to avoid at all costs. She forced a bright, innocent smile to her face. “Most men are in favor of progress.”

He studied her very intently for a moment, before he let the idea pass. “I do favor it, but not above conservation, and it depends on what's being threatened. Some species are going to become extinct despite all our best efforts, you do realize that?”

“Yes,” she said. “But it seems to me that we're paving everything these days. It's a travesty!”

“I've heard of development projects that were stopped because of the right sort of intervention by concerned parties. But it isn't a frequent occurrence,” he remarked.

“I hate a world that equates might with right.”

“Nevertheless, that's how the system works. The people with the most money and power make the rules. It's always been that way, Nikki. Since the beginning of civilization, one class leads and other classes serve.”

“At the turn of the century, industrialists used to trot out Scientific Darwinism to excuse the injustices they practiced to further their interests,” she observed.

“Scientific Darwinism,” he said, surprised. “Yes, the theory of survival of the fittest extended from nature to business.” He shook his head. “Incredible.”

“It's still done,” she pointed out. “Big fish eat little fish, companies which can't compete go under…”

“And now we can quote Adam Smith and a few tasty morsels from
The Wealth of Nations,
complete with all the dangers of interfering in business. Let the sinking sink. No government intervention.”

She stared at him curiously. “Are you by any chance a closet history minor?” she queried with a smile.

“I took a few courses, back in the dark ages,” he confessed. “History fascinates me. So does archaeology.”

“Me, too,” she enthused. “But I know so little about it.”

“You could go back to school for those last two semesters,” he suggested. “Or, failing that, you could take some extension courses.”

She hesitated. “That would be nice.”

But she didn't have the means. She didn't have to say it. He knew already. She'd ducked her head as she spoke, and she looked faintly embarrassed.

She had to stop spouting off, she told herself firmly. Her tongue would run too far one day and betray her brother to this man. She hadn't lied about college, though. Part of the terms of her settlement with Mosby Torrance at their divorce was that he would pay for her college education. And
he had. She'd worked very hard for her degree. The pain she'd felt at her bad experience had spurred her to great heights, but she hadn't been able to finish. She'd had to drop out just after her junior year to help Clayton campaign. Kane didn't know that.

“What do you do for a living?” he asked suddenly.

She couldn't decide how to answer him. She couldn't very well say that she hostessed for her brother. On the other hand, she did keep house for him.

“I'm a housekeeper,” she said brightly, and smiled.

He'd hoped she might have some secret skill that she hadn't shared with him. She seemed intelligent enough. But apparently she had no ambition past being her boyfriend's kept woman. That disappointed him. He liked ambitious, capable women. He was strong himself and he disliked women whom he could dominate too easily or overwhelm.

“I see,” he said quietly.

He looked disappointed. Nikki didn't add anything to what she'd said. It was just as well that he lost interest in her before things got complicated, she told herself. After all, she could hardly tell him who she really was.

N
ikki put the dishes away while Kane wandered around the living room, looking at the meager stock of books in the shelves. She sounded like she was well-read, but the only books he noted were rather weathered ones on law.

“They were my father's,” she told him. “He wanted to be a lawyer, but he couldn't afford the time.”

Or the money, Kane thought silently. He glanced at her. “Don't you have books of your own?”

“Plenty. They're not here, though. The house tends to flood during storms and squalls, so we…I—” she caught herself “—don't leave anything really valuable here.”

As if she probably had anything valuable. His dark eyes slid over her body quietly, enjoying its
soft curves but without sending blatant sexual messages her way.

“You don't look at me as other men do,” she said hesitantly. His eyebrows arched and she laughed self-consciously. “I mean,” she amended, “that you don't make me feel inferior or cheap. Women are rather defensive when men wolf whistle and make catcalls. Perhaps they don't realize how threatening it can be to a woman when she's by herself. Or perhaps they do.”

“You're very attractive. I suppose a man who lacks verbal skills uses the only weapons he has.”

“Weapons.” She tasted the word and made a face. “They are, aren't they? Weapons to demean and humiliate.”

He moved closer. “You're destroying my illusions,” he told her. “I was just thinking that you were unique—a woman comfortable in her femininity.”

“Oh, I am,” she said. “I enjoy being a woman. But there are looks and words that make me uncomfortable. I dislike harassment.”

“Would you believe that men can be made just as uncomfortable by aggressive women?” he asked softly.

She laughed a little. “I suppose so. But one doesn't think of women making men uncomfortable.”

“You'd be amazed,” he confessed.

Her thin eyebrows drew slightly together. “Is she aggressive?”

He stilled. “She?”

“The woman you…your lover.”

She was perceptive, he thought. Too perceptive. He smiled, but it wasn't a pleasant smile. “Yes,” he said. “She's learned how to make me impotent, in fact, and she seems to enjoy it.”

She flushed. “Sorry.” She sat down on the sofa, busying herself with arranging the pillows.

“Oh, hell, I'm sorry, too,” he said gruffly. He sat down in the armchair across from her, his arms crossed on his knees as he stared at her until she met his dark eyes. “You're remarkably inhibited for a woman your age.”

“Am I?” She smiled vacantly.

It should have discouraged him. It didn't. His eyes narrowed as his mind started adding up discrepancies between her flirtatious nature and her reaction to blatant comments. “The man you're living with,” he began. “You are lovers, aren't you?”

She stared at him while her mind struggled with answers that wouldn't give her completely away.

His lips parted and he let out a slow breath. “There's only one answer that fits this whole setup,” he said quietly. “The man you share this beach house with…is he gay?”

She shifted uncomfortably. She couldn't let him
think that about the owner of the beach house, in case he found out somewhere down the road that it belonged to Clayton Seymour. On the other hand, her face had already given away the fact that she didn't sleep with the owner of the beach house.

“No,” she said shortly. “He most certainly is not gay.”

His eyes narrowed. “Then how can you be committed to him when he's never here? Or are you just a one-night stand he can't shake off?”

She got to her feet, her eyes blazing. “You make a great deal of assumptions for a man who knows nothing about my situation.”

He got up, too. He shrugged, sticking his hands in his pockets as he studied her. “You don't add up. All I want is a straight answer. Do you have a lover or not?”

He'd put it in such a way that she could answer it if she wanted to, without implicating her brother. “I'm no maiden,” she said—and it was true, because she'd been married to Mosby.

“I hardly supposed you were,” he returned. His eyes slowly wandered over her. “I want you,” he said bluntly.

She stared at him levelly. Well, what had she expected, professions of love eternal and a sparkly diamond? She drew in a slow breath. “For how long?”

“Until we get tired of each other,” he said.

He was ruthless. She'd suspected that he was, but it was disconcerting to have proof. It was a good thing that she hadn't dashed in headfirst. She studied the floor at her feet, her eyes idly on her sandals and her pink-tipped toes. “I told you at the outset that I don't sleep around.”

“Yes, you did. But I'm offering you more than that. I've given you the impression that I'm poor. I'm not.” He moved closer, his powerful body intimidating as he stood just in front of her, so that the scent of his cologne teased her nostrils. “Nikki, I can pay for you to finish college. I can buy you a place of your own, one that you won't have to share.”

She was almost shaking with indignation. Had he no idea what she was like. He knew that she was intelligent, but that counted for nothing. It was a body he wanted in bed, nothing more. She felt cheap, and she didn't like it.

She lifted cold green eyes to his, and he seemed taken aback by the hostility he saw in them. “I don't have a price tag,” she told him very evenly.

A cynical smile brushed his hard mouth. “Don't you? Suppose I produced a wedding ring? Would that change your mind?”

At the mention of the words, nightmarish memories made her eyelids flicker. She turned away. “I have no interest in marriage,” she said stiffly.

“Then you're a rarity in the world.” He grew
more impatient and irritated by the second. She wasn't reacting as he'd expected. “Most women would trade themselves for the right offer.”

Her hands clenched at her sides while she struggled for composure. She'd had years of practice at the polite, meaningless smile she used on overbearing people. She dredged it up now.

“Then perhaps you'd better fall back on the few you already know,” she said. “I'd like for you to leave now.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor by being honest,” he replied, because he saw her clenched hands.

She was finding that out. “You're absolutely right, you did. It's marvelous to find out that my intelligence and my personality count for nothing with you, that as far as you're concerned, I'm just a slab of meat after all.”

He scowled. “You weren't exactly a shrinking violet yesterday.”

“One kiss and you think you're irresistible?” she asked, wide-eyed.

That did it. His eyes blazed with dark rage. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded.

“Only a woman you've propositioned, don't let it worry you. I'm sure you'll trip over willing bodies on your way back to your own house. Do drive
carefully. Thank you for the fishing trip. And goodbye,” she added, smiling.

How he hated that damned plastic smile! He turned on his heel and strode angrily to the front door. He couldn't remember ever having felt such a violent hatred of a woman.

He went home in a stupor, uncertain why he'd made such a blatant proposition to someone for whom he was beginning to feel a rare tenderness. He didn't understand his own behavior.

It was worse when he remembered how she'd clung to him on the beach the day before, and how much he'd wanted to make love to her right there on the sand. He felt frankly threatened by his own confusion. His desire for her was growing by the second. He needed a woman tonight, badly, to get Nikki out of his thoughts.

But calling Chris was out of the question. He had two other women friends with whom he could satisfy these inconvenient longings. The problem was, they were halfway in love with him. He couldn't take one of them to bed without encouraging her. Damn the luck, he thought furiously. It was Nikki who'd aroused him, but she was the one woman in the world he didn't dare go to for satisfaction. What a joke fate had played on him!

Nikki cleaned up the house and went to sit on the deck. It was stormy-looking. There were dark clouds over the ocean, and she hoped the predic
tions of that tropical depression turning into a full fledged tropical storm were false. She had enough storms in her life.

She wondered if any other woman had ever rejected Kane Lombard after such a blatant proposition. Probably not, once they knew who he was. He had money all right, but what hurt the most was that he'd assumed that because he thought Nikki had none, he felt justified in using money as bait to get her into bed with him.

She dashed away angry tears. She doubted if he'd gone home to spend the night alone. He had a little black book. His photograph wasn't well-known, but he made the gossip columns, just the same. There had been stories in the media about his flings with women, after his wife's untimely death. He'd been almost a playboy, if the gossip columns could be believed. He wouldn't have to go far to find consolation, she knew, and she hated him for that, too.

Mosby had rejected her because he didn't like women. Kane had only wanted to have an affair with her. She seemed destined to spend her life alone.

She tried to tell herself that it was just as well. After all, she had no self-confidence. After her sad interlude with Mosby, she didn't trust her judgment anyway. But Kane wasn't like Mosby.

Well, it was for the best. She didn't want to
become addicted to a man her brother hated and that had already been in danger of happening. She was halfway in over her head and she might be grateful to him for calling it quits, she told herself. He might have just saved her heart from being completely broken. One day, Kane Lombard would have found out her real identity. But her depression lasted far into the night, and the next day, just the same.

 

Clayton had flown back to Charleston for the weekend, taking a sulky Derrie with him. She'd had a date with a promising Washington politician for a play and Clayton had deliberately conned her into this trip and out of D.C. For some reason that he didn't quite understand, he didn't want his executive assistant dating anyone.

It had needled him, that acerbic comment from Bett, the woman he'd been dating casually, about his sister. Bett didn't like Derrie, either. She considered Southern women too helpless and man-loving to be real, and she held them in contempt for what she felt was behavior demeaning to women. Derrie, on the other hand, held Bett in contempt for denying her womanhood while trying to become a man with breasts.

“Couldn't you stop glaring at me?” Clayton asked with a hopeful smile. “Your eyebrows are
going to grow in that position and you'll look like a wrestler.”

Derrie tossed back her blond hair. “Good! Then I can work for myself and make a lot of money.”

“You wouldn't enjoy a job that didn't let you spar with me,” he said smugly. “You'd be miserable.”

“I don't know. I might adopt one of those poor little spotted owls whose houses you're going to help cut down!”

Now he was glaring back. “I'm not personally going to evict one single feathered resident of the northwest forest.”

“You're going to vote for a bill that does,” she returned. She squared her shoulders, obviously setting down to fight.

“We have to provide jobs for the loggers,” he began halfheartedly.

“Great idea. If you want to keep those men working, fund programs to retrain them. You'll have to do it eventually, when all the forests are gone.”

“Forests are being replanted,” he said curtly. “You're not listening.”

“I am. You're not. Forests are being cut down much faster than they can be replaced. Before you sit on that issue with your full weight, it wouldn't hurt to read a few contrary opinions on it.” Her chin lifted. “While we're on the subject, it might
be just as well if you talked to a few people besides Ms. Watts about it. She is a lobbyist. They aren't paying her to tell you both sides of the issue—only theirs. And she's working for the timber industry.”

“I hadn't forgotten,” he said, his voice growing strained.

“Do remember when you vote,” she added, getting out of her seat once the plane was down, “that the American taxpayers aren't getting the benefit of having Ms. Watts in bed with them. So they might not appreciate her position in the same way you do.”

He got up in one lightning motion, more angry than he could ever remember being. “One day, so help me, Derrie…!” he burst out furiously.

“Oh, am I not supposed to know that you're sleeping with her?” she asked with feigned innocence. “Why, how could I not know, when she's advertised your relationship to everyone who works in the building!”

His jaw clenched. Derrie was exaggerating. She must be. “That's unfair.”

“I wouldn't call it that, when she pulled a pair of her lacy pink panties out of your middle desk drawer in front of an aide and two administrative assistants,” she said with fierce distaste. “Didn't she tell you she'd done it? My, my. How thoughtless.”